the trail of the pdb
i’ve been meaning to say something about this whole pdb mini-fiasco for a while, but i don’t want to wrap myself into a full essay, so hopefully i can keep this short…
after fighting the creation of a 9/11 investigative commission…
and fighting against giving that commission subpoena powers…
and in-effect declaring that the “independent, bipartisan commission” is a congressional commission (the separation-of-powers argument keeping dr. rice away from the microphones)….
and putting dr. rice on the media circuit to spin the story…
and limiting access to many documents under the color of classified material (and how did we manage to get people we couldn’t trust with classified material on this commission in the first place?)
and claiming privilege with regard to the presidential daily briefing…
and now spinning the rice testimony and the newly-declassified pdb….
now i get to say something about all this trouble from the bush administration… and speculate a bit. this administration hasn’t been forthcoming, so they’ve left lots of room for speculation.
everyone, up and down the intelligence hierarchy, signed off on this pdb. people in field offices made reports and their superiors passed them up to regional offices, and those got passed up to national offices, and through multiple agencies and through the cabinet-level officials, everyone decided that despite the inability to “corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting,” that this material was important enough for the desk of the president.
now, i may have unreasonable expectations here, but if i saw this document as president the first questions i’d ask are “what do we know about these al quaida members in the united states and this support structure they’ve created?” “what’s the status of these 70 investigations?” “is there anything else we should be doing?” (like, maybe, watching these al qaida members for strange things like… interstate travel or odd financial transactions?).
my people, operating in the most expensive and expansive intelligence-gathering structure in the history of the world used up 30 of less than 500 words in this brief to tell me there was an infrastructure inside the united states operating with the intent to “strike.”
that’s “actionable” enough for me. impossible to know if these actions might prevent or mitigate the 9/11 attacks, but i have more than a month to get upset about “terrorist support structures in the united states.”
it seems that almihdhar and alhazmi were identified as al qaida operatives by the cia in 1999 or 2000 (i’m not digging deep enough to put a solid date on that), but didn’t make the fbi/ins terrorist watch list until late august 2001. would a couple extra weeks have found them? would it have stopped them at the airport?
perhaps moving up the september 4 cabinet meeting on terrorism by a few weeks would make some difference…
anyway, pure speculation, of course…
pdb text below…
Osama bin Laden Determined To Strike in US
Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Osama bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. bin Laden implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Centre bomber Ramzi Yousef and “bring the fighting to America”.
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington according to a XXXXXX service.
An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXX service at the same time that bin Laden was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.
The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of bin Laden’s first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US.
Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.
Ressam says bin Laden was aware of the Los Angeles operation.
Although bin Laden has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks.
Bin Laden associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.
Al-Qaida members – including some who are US citizens – have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qaida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1900s.
A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.
We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a XXXXXX service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “Blind Shaykh” ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers bin Laden-related.
CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.
Declassified and Approved for Relase, 10 April 2004